what are the chances of using a different controller for the fans on the matrix? it would seem to me that if you could run them at a low voltage during idle you wouldn't get the on/off problem although given their size and character it might not be worth it.

It's a shame that ATI really dropped the ball on idle power consumption with this generation. The 38x0 cards were legendary, but the 48x0 are just the opposite.

As a 4870 owner I have spent a lot of time looking into ways of improving idle power consumption. There are various modified BIOSs available but none of them are flawless. The current best one (http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthrea ... 64&t=67928) occasionally gives green spots on my system and tends to crash when doing things like HD video playback or starting a GPU app like Folding@Home, AVIVO video encoding or Elcomsoft's WPA cracking.

It's a shame that ATI really dropped the ball on idle power consumption with this generation. The 38x0 cards were legendary, but the 48x0 are just the opposite.

As a 4870 owner I have spent a lot of time looking into ways of improving idle power consumption. There are various modified BIOSs available but none of them are flawless. The current best one (http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?s=6eafffc7c9b03ee269e300b1568d8964&t=67928) occasionally gives green spots on my system and tends to crash when doing things like HD video playback or starting a GPU app like Folding@Home, AVIVO video encoding or Elcomsoft's WPA cracking.

Not to doubt Mike's expertise or anything but... couldn't the lower idle power consumption be (partly) due to the fact that this Asus card uses a 4 phase power circuitry? And not digital at that?

And of course it is said that 1GB cards use less power than 512MB cards, I'm talking about reference cards of course. And in those same reviews, custom cards with 4 phase power circuitry consume even less power, not night and day, but it's something.

Hoping for ASUS to release a "fixed" (ie: quieter fans) BIOS is probably hoping in vain. I borrowed an ASUS HD 3xxx X2 series card from a friend to try out in my PC, it also has two fans (inside an aluminium shroud), and they make a TERRIBLE racket. It's hairdryers two times over. :s

ASUS supposedly offers software to overclock and regulate fanspeed, but this software needs a very careful installation procedure to make it work:

* First graphics driver, followed by a reboot.

* Then an ASUS proprietary videocapture utility, and another reboot.

* Last, the proprietary GPU tweaker, along with - you guessed it - a third reboot.

This by the way, after the third reboot, is when you discover that the ASUS utilities don't work with standard ATi Catalyst drivers! And the newest ASUS-certified driver is some six months old... So you're stuck with fans that screech like hairdryers unless you're willing to gimp yourself by first uninstalling everything you just installed (except the uninstallers for the ASUS utilities failed to work for me, only giving cryptic error messages), then download an ancient driver version and go through the whole rebooting circus all over again and hope things work out better this time (and that your games work with this pre-historic driver...)

So that is why you don't buy ASUS video cards with proprietary crappy buggy (ugly-looking) software.

The whole design of the cooler on this card is a total mutant by the way, the fans have blades designed to blow downwards, but there's an awful lot of fins right below, plus the PCB itself creating huge backpressure and turbulence. This causes the fan to revv up and just sit there and slosh air around much like a blender, rather than actually"fanning" it... Obviously a poorly thought-out and implemented design, only intended to act as eye candy to pull in and ensnare geeky types. ...Probably with its siren-like wailing fans.

The radial fan of the original cooler is a much better and more efficient concept in comparison, it could have used a bigger diameter blower though.

yes it is. It will get audible during gaming but not badly, and in 2D -- ie, most other windows work -- it'll be pretty much inaudible in a decent case.

I'd agree with this. I have a reference 4870 in an Antec P182 and you could just barely hear the cooler at idle. But for me the problem was hearing the fan ramp up and down while playing 3D games. I don't have the sound turned up particularly high so I don't annoy everybody in the house. Hearing the change in the fan noise is in many ways more annoying than the noise itself.

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